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Saw this coming. Didn't think it would be posted to the forums like this. AGN has no rules prohibiting this ...yet. I don't know if we ever did in the past. I noticed this was removed on PZC. Waiting to see what you all think.

I will ask one question, and that is all. What actual damage can come from this? Sure, people won't be able to prevent others from being able to look at their quests and edit them and enable cheats, but aside from that what can actually happen that is irredeemably bad?

It doesn't give out passwords, it replaces the hashes with an empty password, so no security risk there.
If people start taking assets from other quests and using them without giving credit then usually someone will call them out on it and they will feel like an ass(I have done this myself as I produce 3d models and textures and give them out for free)

The absolute worst thing i can think of coming out of having no passwords would be people making derivatives of a quest with alterations they feel are appropriate and putting them up on the download database, thus changing the original artist's vision for it. I don't see this being a bad enough reason to even have passwords to begin with.

Please explain to me what each of you feel is so bad about not having passwords? I am sorry I offended you, but this will also make the quests able to be ported over to the open source ZC whenever it's done.

Personally I don't mind now that I know it erases passwords instead of extracting them. The only quest I ever password protected was for the purpose of guarding some custom tiles; I've since improved on them and I don't really care if somebody tries to snatch them out of the other file anymore. However, my opinion isn't indicative of the community as a whole.

So the risk of damage is exactly what you've mentioned: people won't be able to prevent others from being able to look at their quests and edit them and enable cheats. Though it is not a sentiment that everyone in the community holds, a large portion of quest developers for ZC feel the need to protect their work and a password scrubber might drive them away. To that end it's plausible that your program would scatter the community, so we need to make sure everybody understands what your code represents before we make any decisions.

While your intentions do seem innocent from another perspective, them actions could of really caused a shit storm if that script would of fell into the hands of the devil or some other hacker. As for your question: worst case scenario is actually a side effect to come, The community as a whole is divided or worst scattered as CJC put it. And if things get to that point Zelda Classic may just cease to exist as a result. This has always been a touchy-fealy subject cause people are willing to kill to protect their quest while other people including myself could give two shits.

You beat me to it by a few days, but I took a different approach and simply patched ZQuest itself. I spent about 15 minutes in IDA Pro and OllyDbg and got this as a result.

Now I'm working on a patch for the Linux build of ZQuest, since that's my primary OS. I'm not releasing anything though.

I only did this because I disliked the name of the protagonist in a quest I'd been playing.
Pretty lousy reason, I know, but technically I could now also fix bugs should I run into any in a password protected quest.

No this doesn't allow me to recover passwords - there are no passwords in quest files - merely a hash of the creator's chosen
password and that's already visible to anyone that opens a protected quest in ZQuest.